The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) congratulates Prof. Dr. Peter Scholze, professor at the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Bonn and director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, on winning the 2018 Fields Medal. DFG President Prof. Dr. Peter Strohschneider said: "We are delighted on behalf of Peter Scholze, whom we previously honoured as an outstanding researcher with the Leibniz Prize in 2016, and who belongs to a Cluster of Excellence funded through the Excellence Initiative. This award also serves as an important confirmation of the fact that the university research landscape in Germany still offers outstanding opportunities to encourage talent and scope to pursue new ideas." The International Mathematical Union (IMU) presented the award to Scholze today at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro "for his fundamental contributions to arithmetic algebraic geometry".
Peter Scholze won the DFG's Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2016 and is a researcher in the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics, a DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence based in Bonn, and a project leader in the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 'Periods, Moduli Spaces and Arithmetic of Algebraic Varieties' in Mainz, Bonn and Duisburg-Essen. He is the second German winner of the Fields Medal after Gerd Faltings, who also won the Leibniz Prize. Up to four Fields Medals are awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians in honour of outstanding contributions to mathematics. The medals are intended to provide motivation for further top-level mathematical research.
At 27, Peter Scholze was the youngest researcher in the more than 30-year history of the Leibniz Prize to be presented with Germany's most important research award. At that time Scholze was already considered to be one of the world's leading mathematicians and the possessor of an exceptional talent which is only seen once in every 20 years or so. The selection committee recognised the fact that even at a young age he was already answering fundamental questions in arithmetic algebraic geometry which had remained unsolved for decades. This is especially true of his proof of the so-called Langlands conjecture for p-adic local bodies. It was noted in 2016 that his theory of so-called perfectoid spaces had dramatically expanded the spectrum of methods in mathematics.
Peter Scholze studied mathematics in Bonn, where he earned his doctorate in 2012 at the age of 24. In the same year he was appointed by the University of Bonn to one of five chairs at the internationally respected Hausdorff Center for Mathematics. Scholze thus became the youngest professor at W3 level in Germany. Scholze has won many important mathematics prizes and is a member of several German academies of sciences. In July 2018 he was appointed director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.
In addition to Peter Scholze, Fields Medals were presented in Rio de Janeiro to Caucher Birkar, University of Cambridge; Alessio Figalli, ETH Zurich; and Akshay Venkatesh, Stanford University.
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Further information
Media contact:
DFG Press and Public Relations, tel. +49 228 885-2109, presse@dfg.de
Read more about DFG funding awarded to Prof. Dr. Peter Scholze at: http://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/person/216136518?language=en
Further information about the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize 2016 awarded to Peter Scholze, including film portrait and laudation, is available at: http://www.dfg.de/en/funded_projects/prizewinners/leibniz_prize/2016/scholze